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From the summit of its highest peak, Denali, to the vast shimmering marshes of the Everglades, draining into the Gulf of Mexico, the landforms of North America impress with their variety. Because so much of the continent's signal topography is preserved in national parks, monuments and other public lands, the outdoors-minded tourist can learn much about basic geology while appreciating some of the most magnificent scenery in the world.

Landform Appearance

The same landform in one physiographic, or geological, area of North America may look quite different than in another. For example, central Wisconsin contains a concentration of rugged sandstone buttes rising above the floor of a former Pleistocene lake, Glacial Lake Wisconsin, whose waters sculpted many of their margins. The formations alone look quite similar to buttes of the Colorado Plateau in the Southwest, but those are naked rock outcrops in a semi-arid climate: In a humid environment, the Wisconsin buttes rise from sandy woodlands, studded with oak and pine.

Observing

National parks protect and showcase many notable landforms of North America. Granite masses of the Sierra Nevada rear from Yosemite Valley in California's Yosemite National Park, including a prime example of an exfoliation dome -- where strips of rock peel from a parent outcrop -- in the form of Half Dome. Visitors to Shenandoah or Great Smoky Mountains national parks see some of the oldest exposed mountains on Earth in the form of the Appalachians. The semi-arid landscapes of the Great Plains, including subtle mesas and heavily eroded breaks, are on display in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, while the parks of the Four Corners country, such as Arches of Grand Canyon, feature an astounding array of impressive geological formations.

Bodies of Water

Many of the great bodies of water of North America lie in its higher latitudes, courtesy of the extensive glaciation cycles of the Pleistocene. Most famously, the Great Lakes occupy archaic drainages enlarged and deepened by glaciers, and now represent some of the largest bodies of freshwater on the planet. Vast numbers of lakes dot the Canadian Shield, an exposed portion of the ancient continental core of North America. Oxbow lakes on river floodplains represent old meanders abandoned when the channel cut off one of its own loops. "Dying" lakes -- those filling in with vegetation through natural ecological succession -- often form shallow-water marshes, while timbered swamps commonly develop along river backwaters and other poorly drained areas.

Observing

A number of public lands protect some of the continent's great swamplands: Congaree National Park in South Carolina, for example, which includes an old-growth riverine swamp of towering trees, and the Big Cypress National Preserve in southwestern Florida, with extensive, seasonally inundated strands and domes of bald-cypress and pond-cypress. The Great Lakes are a popular tourist destination, and include such sites as Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Isle Royale National Park.

About the Author

Ethan Shaw is a writer and naturalist living in Oregon. He has written extensively on outdoor recreation, ecology and earth science for outlets such as Backpacker Magazine, the Bureau of Land Management and Atlas Obscura. Shaw holds a Bachelor of Science in wildlife ecology and a graduate certificate in geographic information systems from the University of Wisconsin.

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